Benazir: Nonpareil of bravery and living by wits

It was the fag end of the year and I was enjoying a rare holiday when the phone rang. It was my son, calling from the US. “So, is she dead or not?” he asked without preamble. Dead? Who is he talking about, I wondered, and confessed I was completely clueless. “Oh, don’t you know,” he continued, amazed at my ignorance, “Benazir has been shot and we’re getting conflicting reports. Some say she is dead, some that she’s been injured; I thought you’d know for sure.”

Oh, the faith (misplaced?) in journalists! As I rushed to put on the television only to learn that she had indeed been killed my mind went back to that morning in December about two years ago when Benazir was in the capital and we’d met for an interview. Musharraf was then firmly entrenched, there was little prospect of either elections in Pakistan or of her returning home.

Yet when we met there was nothing down-and-out about her. Her regal air as she swept into the room without a word of apology for keeping me waiting (though I’d been warned, “She doesn’t like to be kept waiting, so please be on time,”) would normally have meant a frosty start to the interview. But the warmth of her smile disarmed me completely. As did the discovery that we were close contemporaries. Born just six months apart, we seemed to share a similar world view and a longing for peace between our two countries.

She exuded charm and elegance from every pore. For all the stories of her enormous wealth, there weren’t too many obvious signs, other than the huge single pearls on her ear-lobes, the (diamond?) bracelet and the diamond-studded watch on her wrist. Nor was she without a sense of humour. Asked for her views on General Musharraf she quipped, “I’d like to say a lot about the general, but let me get back to London before I say it.”

Even then she distanced herself from the official position of the Pakistani government. “There is a general tendency to regard the official position of Islamabad as the position of all the people of Pakistan. That is a mistake. The Pakistan Peoples’ Party, with its grass roots support has its own world view. It is important for the Indian government to realise that while there is a position of the Pakistani establishment but there is also a position of the Pakistani people.” It was clear which position she identified with.

But wasn’t she equally responsible for the impasse in Indo-Pak relations? Wasn’t she also hawk when she was in power, I asked, not entirely buying her line. Only to be taken aback by her frank reply. “I feel I could have made more of an effort for a breakthrough in my last tenure. In my first tenure when I was able to work closely with Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, we did have several breakthroughs. But that kind of breakthrough hasn’t happened since and so people think nothing has changed overall.”

She had not lost the art of double-speak, so important for survival in the jungle of politics. So while she agreed that formalisation of the line-of control as the international border could be a solution, she was quick to add that her personal view was quite different. “My view is that the LoC goes back 50 years in time. And if we do that the next 50 years are going to be no different from the last 50 years.”

She believed in democracy but of a different kind. “The people of my country need a model other than a Western-backed dictatorship or a mullah-backed dictatorship. There is a yearning for democracy. The good thing is we’re all talking elections. The question is, is it going to be a sham election or a fair one?”

So did she want to go back to Pakistan and see this happening? There was no mistaking her sincerity. “Of course, I want to go back to Pakistan.” What about the corruption cases? The anger was not concealed. “There are no corruption cases. Five years of investigation have failed to establish a single corruption case against me.” There was a faint glimmer of tears in her eyes. It was hard to believe it was contrived. Just as it’s hard to believe that today this enormously plucky woman is no more!